Unique Original Articles » FLASH TUTOR

FLASH TUTOR

Flash is the king of animation. Any basic flash tutorial should cover text, layers, adding motion, sound, and text to a Flash movie.

This flash tutor will make you familiar with words like: properties, grid, oval tool, creating a symbol, gradients, rectangle tool, pencil tool, grouping, layers, renaming/adding a layer, rotate and scale, changing orders of layers, keyframes, motion tween, adding sound, adding a button, and text tool.

To get started with this flash tutorial, open Flash professional 8 and click the flash document.


Flash Tutor Movie Properties

In the upper corner to your left you should see the tools palette. These tools can be use to create/modify graphics or text. To set the tools options, use te modifiers. In the upper portion of the screen, you will also find the timeline. This timeline is used to lay out the sequence of the movie.

Finally, there’s a stage in the centre screen, where you actually create the moving animation.

Gradients

Gradients can be found in the fill color box. They can be found in the bottom row and can be used to create complex paterns such as the sky. This flash tutor will also tell you how to create your own gradients. Pick Windows and then color mizer from the menu. Choose linear and then the edit gradient range icon. Finally add swatch.

Creating a symbol in flash

Flash tutor will now show you how you can turn any graphic into a symbol and then store it in a library. These items can be used later on. Simply pick your graphic and then Modify>Convert to symbol. Chose button as the type of behavior and select OK. /Open the Library panel from the windows menu. You should see your symbol stored there.

Grouping in Flash

You can combine two different objects into a single object and then turn it into a symbol. This is a common technique and flash tutor will now show you how it’s done. Choose Modify>Group and then Modify>Convert to symbolfrom the menu. Give a relevant name in the name field. For the behavior type pick graphic and hit OK. The object should now appear in the library. Hit delete key to remove this object from the stage if it is unnecessary.

Layers

Layers are very useful not only in flash but also in other softwares like auto cad. They have revolutionized the software industry. You can turn them on/off and delete/add them any time you want. Say you had a red and blue pen. You use red for atmosphere and blue for characters. Now say you wanted to get red of the atmosphere and see only the charaters. Layers allow you to do just that.

Article Source: JS2 Article Marketing